Butler grunted with vexation as the light dawned on him. He'd prided himself that he knew the Audley technique, but he'd been mighty slow recognising it this time, that habit of telling the truth, but not all the truth.
So sure, it was true that he was here on the Wall to do Audley's dirty work, because Audley's reputation in university circles must be preserved for the future.
But before the future there was a present problem to be solved.
'. . . It'll appeal to your military mind. Did you ever serve in the north of England?'
'I was at Catterick for a while.'
'Only just the north. Northumberland and Cumberland —they're the real north, where the Wall runs.
We'll save the best bit for the third day. You can send your bags ahead to Castleshields and walk the stretch from Milecastle 34. Then you'll be at the house in time for tea . . .'
Butler watched the hire car out of sight before turning towards the rough pasture at the side of the road.
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There was not going to be anything to see at Milecastle 34, he could read the Ordnance Survey map of the Wall well enough now to know that.
But it was 0910 and at 0915 he was due to start walking westwards along that red line on the map. And whether he got the feel of it or not didn't much matter, because that wasn't the object of the walk. At least he knew that if he understood little else.
Trouble was—when it came to it, it wasn't so easy to be a stalking horse (or was he decoy-duck or Judas goat?): it was remarkably difficult not to remember his training, consciously to keep his eyes away from the back of his neck. In fact it was not just difficult, it was damned impossible.
There were two of them and they took point in turn.
One, the medium-sized older one, had a reversible three-quarter length overcoat, not really quite the most suitable garment for wall-walking, no matter which side out; the other, distinctively tall and gangling, at least looked like a hiker, with his green hooded-windcheater and khaki rucksack.
Possibly—no, almost certainly—there was a third man out of sight, driving slowly back and forward along General Wade's road, which had left the line of the Wall just before Milecastle 34. There might even be others for all Butler knew.
But of these two he was certain; it was their bad luck that the wind was so piercing today that it had driven everyone else indoors, or so it seemed. Even the traffic on the road away to the south seemed light for a Friday morning, with few private cars and only a spatter of lorries and army vehicles to be seen.
Carefully he kept his pace steady. He mustn't test them with variable speeds, or awkward delays, or little tricky detours; mustn't notice that they set the rooks flapping from the copse in the last hollow or sent the jackdaws sailing out of the cliffs. Mustn't do a damn thing except follow his itinerary to the letter.
In the end he began to follow it in spirit too, not so much from inclination as from the necessity of occupying his mind with something.
Audley had been right about this land he had entered at 0915. Hitherto the line of the Wall had run through neutral territory, first in the sprawl of Newcastle, then over rolling farmland, and more recently through the poorer upland pastures. Across such terrain one military engineer's line was as good as any other's.
But now he had come to a place which God had landscaped to be a frontier, with wave after wave of rising crags, their cliffs always rearing to the north.
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And along those crags the Romans had built their Wall.
But it was more than a mere wall, this Wall, he saw that now. For here at last, here and now, he could relate what he knew to what he saw. It mattered not at all any longer that the famous line was often no more than a few courses high, or a mere jumble of stones buried in the turf, or even nothing at all. Here undoubtedly there had been a great wall, with all those turrets and forts he had read about. Even when he couldn't see it he knew it was there.
And yet at the same time he knew—and knew it as these academics could never know, he told himself—
that this was not the true wall.
The true wall was made of men.
In its day there had been half-trained frontier guards here, little better than customs officers, on the Wall itself. But the real strength of the Wall would have been in those tough, long-enlistment regiments in the fortresses, which the books described stupidly as 'auxiliaries', but which he guessed had been the Gurkhas and Sikhs of their day, those Dacians and Lusitanians.
And for them the Wall itself would have been a mere start line.
Indeed, the world hadn't changed so much as people imagined. Life up here would have added up to the same endless quest for information which he knew so well, and peace would have depended on the ability of the Wall's intelligence officers to smell out trouble in advance.
What mischief were the troublemakers in the northern tribes hatching? Had their harvest been dangerously bad or dangerously good—were the young warriors restive because of hunger or idleness?
And that, exactly, was what he and Audley were engaged in now: there were troublemakers loose and the young men were restive.
Butler sighed. The historians seemed agreed that the Wall had been an expensive failure. Certainly it had been breached disastrously three times in three centuries.
Yet twice that had been because of the treachery of Roman governors who had stripped it of men to pursue their continental ambitions, and only once—as far as he could see— had its own intelligence system failed.
Once in three hundred years—once in ten generations—did not seem to him so very disgraceful. For how many other times had the system met the challenge and won?
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That was the bugger of this game: you only won in private and always lost in public!
